Thread by @akoz33

Polish-American virologist Hilary Karpowski, who was the first man to create a live polio vaccine. He was born in an assimilated Jewish family in Warsaw, at that time in the Russian Empire. He finished medical studies at the University of Warsaw and also studied music at Warsaw

And in Rome. He luckily left Poland in 1939, and lived in the United States since 1944, where he worked as a professor at the Thomas Jefferson University. In 1952 Jonas Salk developed the first effective polio vaccine. It used a dead virus and was not fully effective. Several

researchers, including Karpowski and Alfred Sabin believed that an attenuated live vaccine would be more effective. Karpowski was the first to develop one, Alfred Sabin developed another (he initially made use of Karwowski’s work but Sabin’s vaccine is considered independent).

Because of Salk’s influence (and animosity) neither Sabin nor Karpowski could not perform large scale tests of their vaccines or get them approved. Sabin took his vaccine to the Soviet Union, where the leading Soviet virologist Mikhail Chumakov and his wife Marina Voroshilova

organised test on over 100 million people and mass production of Sabin’s oral polio vaccine (I am preparing a very long thread on the remarkable Chumakov family). Sabin’s vaccine eventually returned to the US and became the most widely used. Karpowski tok his vaccine to Poland

and to Congo. The vaccine (which like Sabin’s was orally administered) was a great success - in both countries polio was eliminated (so now I know that in my childhood I was vaccinated with Karwowski’s and not with Sabin’s live polio vaccine).
In 2007 Poland’s President Lech

Kaczyński awarded Karpowski the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_… )

Karpowski died in 2013 but not before becoming the “hero” of an awful conspiracy theory.
There seems to be something about viruses that attracts conspiracy theorists. If you search the internet for the great American virologist Robert Gallo, who proved that the HIV virus

causes AIDS (Gallo should have at least shared the Nobel prize that was awarded to Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi, who were the first to isolate the virus but could not prove that it caused AIDS, it was Gallo who proved it) you can still find insane allegations that Gallo actually

created the HIV virus. But the same allegation was made against Karpowski by the journalist Tom Curtis, who alleged in “Rolling Sone” and in a letter to “Science” that Karpowski’s live polio vaccine caused the spread of HIV in Africa. The claim was that Karpowski had used in his

vaccine materials taken from chimpanzees, which were carriers of HIV. Karpowski published details of the production of his vaccine, from which it is clear that nothing to do with chimpanzees was used. Later research also debunked the hypothesis of a relationship between the polio

vaccine and AIDS in Africa.